


for having loved a little while

by brella



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Past Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 22:57:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2001147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happens like this and like this and like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for having loved a little while

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mumblingmaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblingmaria/gifts).



> Maria, today is your birthday. (Addendum: Yesterday was your birthday and I'm bad with deadlines.) It marks the fact that you have been on this Earth for 21 years, and in my (admittedly biased) opinion, said Earth is monumentally better off for every single one of those. You're sunshine, you're inspiring, you're a treasure. I am so happy that you are my friend.  
> I hope you have (had) a birthday half as marvelous as you are.

“This is real,” she breathes, and there’s blood dripping from her nose, and water from her gnarled hair, and all the air has left her, and her knees are in the mud, and smoke fills her raw nostrils, and she’s so tired, aching everywhere, scraped joints and burns and bruises and no more room for doubting or being afraid. “This is real. You know how I can tell?”

“How?” The whisper hits the back of her neck, and there’s a hand coming to rest against her spine; the world must be ending, somewhere on the edge of where they are, past the three gates, past the apple tree that’s only charcoal now. 

She closes her eyes, sees oceans, watches time fill the spaces between her shaking fingers.

“I still hate you.”

The world beneath them tips and spills. Maybe that’s all right, she thinks. She drags him close, feels his frantic heartbeat against her skin, screws her eyes shut when his arms come around to clutch her and he whispers something she can’t hear.

Death is all relative, when you get right down to it. Put a quarter in within the next ten seconds, and you get to try again.

He would appreciate the reference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

_Would it have been worth while,_

_To have bitten off the matter with a smile,_  
_To have squeezed the universe into a ball_  
_To roll it toward some overwhelming question,_  
_To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,_  
_Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"_  
_If one, settling a pillow by her head,_  
_Should say, "That is not what I meant at all._  


_That is not it, at all."_

* * *

  
  
  
  
  
  


Hunter really needs to do his laundry. Like, Casey can fully smell it, and she’s not even in his room. She’s standing in the dark hallway with her hood up and her fists stuffed into her sweatshirt pocket and her eyes itchy from lack of sleep, and he’s gawking at her, equal parts panicked and pleasantly surprised, and her nostrils flare against her will.

“Hi,” he greets her after a beat. He tries to lift his hand to wave, but accidentally whacks the door and winces, gritting his teeth. His effort at a perky smile through his watering eyes is pretty impressive, but ultimately a failure. “What’s up?”

He loses the vowels, a little, through his clenched jaw, and she sees out of the corner of her eye that he tries shaking his hand out like it’ll help. His bedhead is pretty spectacular, in a baffling sort of way; vivid orange sticks out in a plethora of askew directions, and the imprint of his pillowcase is still pink and noticeable on his left cheek, and his t-shirt is a little crooked, and his boxers are slipping down a little. Typical.

And, okay, it’s late. (Not that he’d _know_ , or anything.) (Wow. _That_ was mean.) He has every right to look like he just fumbled his way out of bed. She cannot fairly expect Hunter—or any of them, really—to be on the alert at all times just because she is. But look, it’s not her fault; she can’t sleep, because a jumbled host of fragmented lives and television static to which she is not prepared to claim ownership won’t stop climbing up the walls of her brain, and it’s borderline maddening, and she doesn't believe in beating around the bush; she never has; so she locks eyes with him and keeps her voice low.

“Could we…” She moves her head to the side a little, lifting a shoulder, pulling a hand out of her pocket to gesture vaguely like it will somehow conjure up the right words from somewhere at the bottom of her. “Talk?”

“Talk?” he repeats, looking genuinely astonished—she feels like she should be offended, on some level, but she isn’t. It’s not like she’s built up a persona of being emotionally open, or anything. “Yeah. No, yeah, sure, of course. Do you want to come in?”

“Unless you like the lighting better out here in the hallway,” Casey deadpans, raising her eyebrows to punctuate the point.

He seems to think that she’s serious for a second, starting to frown perplexedly and edge slightly over the threshold of the door, so she sighs without malice and cuts him off with a step forward and a thrown arm.

“Kidding,” she tells him, ignoring the red creeping up his neck. “Yes, I want to come in.”  

“Oh.” He clears his throat, but doesn’t move away despite the new proximity. “Cool, then.”

He steps aside a little too hastily, ducking his head and scratching the crown of his head, and Casey sidles past him. Her shoulder grazes his and he jumps away, prompting her to glance sharply at him with high eyebrows, but he isn’t looking at her, focused firmly on the floor.

“Just, um,” he says, “Everybody else is asleep, so…”

“I know how to whisper,” Casey whispers.

Hunter, nodding, mouths an exaggerated “ _oh_ ” and finally lets her pass the rest of the way, gingerly shutting the door behind her.

She glances over the room, taking in the pile of unwashed clothes at the foot of Hunter’s bed, noting Jun and Guillaume’s still forms, narrowing her eyes at the sound of Ike mumbling incoherently in his sleep. She jabs her thumb in his direction and turns her head over her shoulder, a silent question of, _Is he always like this?_

Hunter immediately ceases his pained clutching of his hand to straighten up and quietly clear his throat and nod. Casey gives him her best look of pity, but he misses it, moving to lean against the wall next to the door jamb.

She mouths a slightly frustrated, “ _What are you doing?_ ”

Illustratively, he shifts a bit before sinking down to plop in a sitting position on the floor, patting the space beside him.

She’d barely be able to see him if it weren’t for the frail glow of the moon outside. She’d probably also barely be able to make it over to him without tripping over the orange gym sneakers in the middle of the floor, but she steps over them, deciding not to say anything, because she is not, she reminds herself, his keeper.

She shuffles over and silently sits, crossing her legs, folding her arms at her chest and dropping her back against the wall. She can feel each of his darting glances hit the air next to her neck, but she staunchly watches the open window, the clouds edged in nacreous white crawling past.

“So, uh,” Hunter says after the companionable silence has gone on a while, and Casey, even though she can’t see it, knows that he must be touching the back of his neck, bowing his head sheepishly under it. “What did you want to talk about?”

She considers the answer. She could always lie; he’d believe it in an instant, because he’s just that stupid when it comes to her. She could say that she wanted to talk about the weather and he’d suddenly want to become a meteorologist. She breathes in.

What _does_ she even want to talk about, like, really? What exactly is she hoping to accomplish that requires she tread right over the silent courtesy agreement not to speak to him for at least two weeks after what could easily qualify as a cold rejection? She hasn't noticed any changes, other than that the way Hunter _gazes_ at her has gone from dreamily admiring to something softer and more stalwart than she cares to contemplate, less lovelorn and more aching. He hasn't shown any signs of wanting to talk to her since she'd been released from the nurse's office (since she'd stormed furiously out and threatened that if they tried to give her one more goddamn blood pressure check she'd burn the place down), but he hasn't shown any signs of malice, either, so... what does it mean?

She doesn't care _that_ much, or anything. It should be at the absolute bottom of her priorities. The question that's been turning itself over ad nauseum in her head, really, has had a lot more to do with how he'd come to shout out her name in that basement room than why he hasn't been talking to her unless she talks to him first.

Again. No sense in beating around the bush, or whatever. Her mother had raised her to be frank and she's not about to start siphoning that away from herself now, now that it might be one of the few vestiges she has left.

Her stomach drops. She closes her eyes and wills it to draw back up again, and when it does, she opens them.

“There’s—something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she mutters.

He visibly perks up in her peripheral. “Sure. I mean, yeah, go for it. Ask away.”

She has to admit that it’s pretty incredible how quickly the vaguest string of words she says can fling him into such audible nervousness. She wonders how he does it—how he has the guts never to hide anything, how he manages to think that such mindless honesty won’t land him somewhere compromising someday.

“How…” She subtly tucks her lower lip under her teeth and furrows her brow, grabbing the nearest pencil and pretending that it needs to be examined with painstaking attention. “When I was… down in that room. With the Cylinder. I don’t remember how I got there, or what happened; the first thing I remember is—you.” She swears she feels the air get a little tighter between their shoulders, but maybe that’s just the weight of the word. “How did you get there?”

“I, um,” Hunter flummoxes, “Walked?”

“No, I mean—” She shoots her eyes to the ceiling in what she hopes will be read as exasperation rather than uncertainty. “How did you _know_ to be there? Right then? Right when I—” _Needed you_. “Passed out?”

She hadn’t even hit the ground, she thinks; no part of her had been sore from any impact—she had come vaguely to, images foaming in and out against the forefront of her skull, with the sensation of a sweaty hand delicately holding hers, and there had been the rapid echoes a familiar desperate voice, muffled and far-off, and a palm had fit the shape of her heavy head and lifted it.

She’d had a hazy, fleeting thought that it was nice to know that Hunter was still willing to speak to her, even after what had happened. It had seemed silly for a while, that she’d done something like wait for three and a half hours under a tree for this boy, but a part of it had made sense, then, somewhere between his blurted reassurances and the way he’d cautiously helped her to her feet, slinging her arm over his shoulders and walking up a hundred stairs under her weight and not saying a word.

“It was just a little out of your way, is what I’m saying,” she continues, feeling increasingly stupid by the syllable, which is an unfamiliar sensation. “Like, how do you go from Woodrun to… where I was, conveniently?”

“Well…” He glances pointedly away, flattening a hand on the back of his neck. “It’s kind of a long story.” Which is, of course, poorly constructed code for the fact that it’s probably more of a crazy story that he doubts she or anyone else in their right mind would believe.

"I have a pretty solid attention span," she tells him, a bare scrap of humor, and rather than lifting the words up under a dry glare, she smiles wanly, encouragingly. "Sorry. I want to know."

“Yeah, but, see, part of it is that _I_ don’t really know how I got there, either,” Hunter explains at a less contained volume, immediately looking remorseful and hunching in a little as if to hide from Jun and Guillaume and Ike, none of whom so much as stirs. “Like, one second this guy is giving me a melon and the next there’s a giant spinning thing and you’re about to do something very dangerous and brave and stupid—”

“Taking a page out of your book,” Casey interjects with a wryly quirked eyebrow, but Hunter doesn’t smile. He finally looks her in the eye, all somber focus and shadowed fear and Casey's feeble jocularity stumbles off of her face.

“I’m serious,” he mutters, and she feels momentarily thrown by the role reversal, by the fact that now he’s the one reminding her of how real everything is. “I thought—”

He doesn't finish. Doesn't even try to. Casey thinks she hears it in his hushed voice, though, or spots it in his eyes when he shoots them down again, afraid, unable to grapple with whatever is stirring in the unexplored parts of his running heart.

“Hunter, come on,” she half-chuckles, a little incredulously, part of her having trouble believing she still has to say this (or maybe that knowing him for a few weeks has come to this, sitting next to him on the floor in the dark and speaking in low voices and not looking him in the eye because it makes her stomach jump). “We’ve talked about this. Look where we are. What could you conceivably come up with that would sound crazy at this point?”

He shrugs like an eight-year-old pointedly avoiding the question of who threw tan bark in another kid’s face. To stop her hand from wanting to stray over and jostle his shoulder, she closes all of her fingers over the nape of her neck and hunches over, resting her elbows against her now-lifted knees, rubbing a line along the warm skin, and tilts her head, watching him without faltering, waiting.

It all starts to spill from him at once and then it just escalates, a disjointed narrative that just keeps getting more intense (and there are many rewinds, jumps back to facts that he’d missed in his haste to get to the meat of it): how he had seen Zoe kill someone, how her red life-bits had splattered over him when Irina had shot her through the supple chest, how his leg had been grazed by a bullet and he’d visited the Tower of Babel and been used to unlock the universe, or whatever; how he’d come to understand how Zoe might have felt if she’d lived, his own shoulder torn open by a shot from Irina’s rifle, how he’d met a future version of Jade who had scared him, a little, and here Casey stops him and orders him to return to the small detail of a _bullet going through him, back to chest_.

“No, but it was okay,” he reassures her, waving a hand, “Because Future Jade had healing powers,” and she must pull quite a face at that one, because he pouts as though wounded and mumbles, “It’s the truth.”

“I mean, I guess it’d have to be, unless the getting shot part was a lie,” Casey sighs, unwrinkling her skeptical nose.

“Honest to God, I would’ve totally died, but then I met Future Jade and the whole near-fatal wound was completely gone and then we walked around for a while and talked about chess metaphors and then the school was _totally wrecked_ —”

It goes on, and on, and further on than she would have fathomed, and suddenly her amnesia seems very boring, a drop in the ocean of Descartian dreams and test answer books and silver lights and cryptic messages about the course of the future that Hunter’s treading clumsily in.

“Anyway, the point is,” he starts to conclude (his voice is hoarse, and the steady murmuring volume of it has made Casey go a little limp), “She just—opened a door, and there you were. I didn’t know what you were doing, and for a second there it was like, hey, giant glowing cylinder thing, that’s new, but she was making it sound like you were gonna _die_ , and you couldn’t _die_ , that just wasn’t…”

(And he doesn’t tell her how everything inside of him had plunged, an unstoppable release of all value of life, when he had seen her stepping closer to that whirling thing, when he had seen the tears rivering down her face and heard her scream and watched the bolts of blue energy shoot from the end of her hair and her fingertips and her swallowing eyes, when he had forgotten all about what it felt like to carry around a bruised heart pumped by mortified bitter blood, when he had forgotten all about anything, anything at all, except the permanent image of what she might have looked like in the evening sun with a picnic blanket underneath her, except the unshakable certainty that she was all that should live in the whole world, that she was hope in a breakable body, that he was sorry for being so _fucking stupid_ and she had to live, just live, live forever, a hundred forevers, _don’t do it, Casey, this is a stranger telling you he loves you but that’s not why he’s running to you, he’s running to you because you don’t give up Casey Blevins just like you wouldn’t give up the frame the universe is built on_ , and he doesn’t tell her that when she had fallen, parts of him had fallen, too, and they still hadn’t come back up, scattered far below, where all the ways that second could have gone are strewn, and he doesn’t tell her—)

That just wasn’t part of the story.

He trails off. He draws his knees up to his chest and rests his folded arms atop them, slumping forward until the lower half of his face is obscured and his eyes have wandered in some direction she can’t follow. Casey’s heart is pressing against the walls of her throat. She never should have come in here, she thinks in a delirious and evasive rush; she never should have; there’s still time to just stand up and walk out and act like nothing’s changed, but she remembers something more, now, remembers how when she had heard him coming toward her (and oh, she had) she had been overwhelmed by a sweeping feeling of both remorse and peculiar comfort, like that something easier was coming, the reassurance that what she had misused had not yet had the foresight to give up on her, and that had been nice, for reasons she can’t fathom now; it had been nice to know that Hunter was still here, that Hunter had turned out all right in the end, that Hunter was still young and Hunter still had the luxury of prioritizing the things he cared about instead of the things he had no other choice but to—that Hunter still thought there was something good to be said about Casey Blevins, though that had just been another testament to how little, how very little, he really knew.

Her head hurts. Clumsily, she stands, temples throbbing with dull insistence for something she can’t understand, and he says her name like it’s the most delicate thing in the world and he’s just smashed it to pieces.

“It’s fine,” she tells him, but her voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “I’m fine. I’m just tired.”

Maybe she manages to blunder out something about seeing him some other time; she doesn’t know. When she takes the doorknob, it slips under her sweaty palm. He doesn’t ask her to stay.

(He never has, she thinks inexplicably.)

(That’s about where the dreams start.)

  
  
  


* * *

  
  


“Where did you get this?” she demands, hair shorter, eyes wider, no desire to wrestle back the energy in her voice or the way she holds up the solid block of wrapped Hershey’s and stares at it in wonder.

“On a scale of one to Pearl Harbor, what’ll the consequences be if I tell the truth?” he replies, tugging at his collar. It will rain soon. The encampment looks a mess, but that’s what she’s here for.

She narrows her eyes over her wry smirk and lowers the rare treasure again, before handing it back in a swat right in his chest; he coughs, air briefly knocked out of him, and flattens his hands against it. His uniform could use a wash. The watch on his wrist has been broken for some time, if the dirt ingrained in the crushed fractures on the glass face is anything to go by.

“Secret’s safe with me, private,” she assures him, not thinking about how he’ll probably be dead like droves of others by the end of the month, not thinking about how things must be back home, not thinking about impressing any generals or proving that it’s all right for her to be here; coyly, she extends a hand, curling her fingers inward in beckoning. “On one condition. We split that.”

Rather than looking miffed at having to share, he loosens, grinning, color seeping onto his cheeks.

“Wow,” he breathes. “My kind of girl.”

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“I don't know, it sounds stupid,” Hunter says in a rush, ruffling his own hair in mild frustration, “But I just—I feel like I’ve known you all my life sometimes. Or even longer than that. So for, like, eight lives. That’s weird, right? That’s—” He coughs out an incredulous laugh, and Casey thinks, for a single lurching second, that he’s about to cry. “That’s _insane_."

Casey doesn't think that it is, not really, for reasons unbeknownst. But what comes out, instead of that, is a safe and pragmatic, "Yeah, kind of."

He unravels at the tense shoulders, head lowering, mouth thinning in surrender. She feels like she just smashed something fleeting that’s never going to come back. She had a dream, once, that his blood was all over her arms and her name was splitting apart on his tongue and he had looked different and so had she (they’d both been girls) but it had been _him_ and she’d woken up with a tight throat and hadn’t gone back to sleep.

“Right,” he murmurs. “You’re right. Sorry, I…”

He loses the rest of it. He seems a little older, if being older makes you sadder, if being older means you start to get lost in dark corners instead of looking for a way out.

(Vanessa had seen it, a few weeks ago, during a meeting in the basement, when Casey had stared at Hunter for a beat too long before he’d split off with Jun and Jade to head for the greenhouse. “Don’t do it, Casey,” she had admonished her in a voice that had known devastatingly well to what it was referring; “Don’t go there.” _Cut out your own heart if you have to_ , the whispers between the vague words had insisted.)

Casey thinks that this is what it must feel like. Drowning.

  
  
  
  


* * *

 

The girl opposite her is lit up by the moonlight; she reaches a hand up and scratches the back of her neck and averts her gaze, bashful, a touch of embarrassed, and mumbles, “I should really be trying to impress you right now…”

“What for?” she demands, not accusatorially.

“Because I want you to like me,” the girl blurts out, and she’s lovely, practically buckling under her own sincerity, and there’s nothing else out here but her and the sea and the turning bicycle wheels, a quiet clatter as the crickets start to keen.

“I do,” she promises, wanting to take her hand, wanting to walk a hundred miles like this until they find somewhere nice to be, but there’s no room for dreams in small towns, and the journey would take too long, and neither of them has a watch.

  
  
  
  


* * *

  


They get thrown into cells next door to each other. Only a week, Daramount assures them, to teach them the value of obedience; Casey pounds her fists against the wall and screams and curses and screams some more on the three occasions that she hears a whip cracking and a human crying out on Hunter’s side of the wall.

Daramount only comes in to see her once, and Casey spits in her face. That earns her a backhanded slap that splits open her cheek (Daramount cherishes her rings), and Hunter asks about it day after day, and she remembers then that he’s a doctor’s kid, conditioned to fret over the small things.

And things have certainly taken a turn, she thinks, from the time they would accidentally exchange fraught or heavy looks during the meetings in the basement but not say anything, from the time she had remembered the way he had held her and posed no questions as she’d cried out all the air in her and had specifically gone to him so she could do it again. She is uncomfortable with the notion that she’s capable of making mistakes enormous enough to land good people in places like this, but the notion has become a fact, and no amount of meaningless and brittle talks she and Hunter have through the tiny hole in the wall about movies and the differences between Canadian and American currencies will distill that. Were she a braver person, she might tell him that she’s sorry, if she knew exactly what she was supposed to be sorry about.

“We’re gonna be okay,” he’ll say every now and then, and even though the first few times she can’t trawl up an agreement for fear that it will be artificial, this time, she rests the side of her face against the stone next to the hole and closes her eyes and whispers, “Yeah, we are.”

“Look, Casey, I’m—” He breaks it off at the edge, reconstructing something milder than whatever jumps instinctively out of his heart, and she runs her dirty, blood-encrusted fingers along the grooves of the stone, eyes adjusted fully, now, to the dark. “I’m really… I’m really glad you’re here. Well, no, I mean, not _here_ , in this cell, getting tortured daily—shit, no, that’s awful—what I mean is I—”

“I’m glad you’re here, too, Hunter,” she interrupts softly, and when he falls quiet, she wrestles up some bone of humor from inside of her and appends, “Not in this cell. Shit, no, that’s awful.”

(And he doesn’t tell her that he has dreams about her, or about kissing her until his mouth is sore and speechless, because maybe the best way to demonstrate your undying love, or whatever the fuck this is, this dust on the tip of his heart made from variations on the name _Casey_ is to pretend you don’t have any at all.)

 

* * *

 

 

 

Part of her does hate him. For all kinds of overcomplicated (and honestly bullshit) reasons, but most of all because it is wrong of her heart to shiver at the sight of him when there are so many other things weighing it down, and it is wrong to wonder what it would be like, maybe, just maybe, to shut the door in an empty classroom when the sun is dyeing the walls a smoldering orange and kiss him, teeth and tongue, until he doesn’t even remember the syllables to form her name (until she drags it back out of him with her skin)—because that’s all stupid, and beyond her, and below her, and she has no time for it.

(But keeps coming back to it. "You know, Casey, some might suggest that feelings of such a laughably romcom caliber in this situation would be what the industry likes to call 'poorly conceived,'" Ike tells her smugly once, and Casey wants to go and leap off a bridge, for fuck's sake, because that is the proper reaction to _agreeing with Ike on something_.)

  


 

* * *

  


 

 

It happens like this and like this and like this:

Coming back from the woods one night, they're both sweaty and chilly and out of breath and when they come to a stop outside their respective rooms, Casey feels sticky and exhausted and there are definitely twigs in her gnarled ponytail, and Hunter, no preamble, all of the humble requests for permission evident in his gestures and granted in hers, swallows hard and lets his eyes go hooded and tips her head back and pushes his mouth to hers, messily, hungrily, a thousand seconds of pent-up ache and want and beatification of every part of her, elbows and throat and earlobes, and that's the one she can't stop thinking about, even after the next—

 _Blade Runner_ is barely halfway through and they're sharing a blanket and this whole AV Club room location is entirely new to her, as is the concept of shared dream space, which almost definitely implies that Hunter knows this entire movie from memory, which is kind of sad; he keeps glancing over at her to gauge her reactions even though he  _knows_ she's seen it twice, but one of them just doesn't bother straying back to the screen and she imagines it's the fluorescent blues illuminating her face, but she looks right back at him, heart on her tongue, belly roiling with anticipation, and they all but leap at each other, blanket tangling between their legs, and he barely manages to fumble for the mute button before she has him ensnared and opens her mouth against his and isn't scared of any-fucking- _thing_ —

He's bleeding and hissing out curse words of pain and the wound is largely superficial, largely, another treat from Irina, but she'd thought for a second that he would be just another person she couldn't bring back, so she fists his shirt in her hands and yanks him too roughly up and kisses him so hard and so violently that their teeth hit each other's and pain shoots through her upper lip and she thinks she can taste the tiniest bit of his blood and she breaks off every now and then, swearing at him, spouting off lies about how much she hates him, and no part of that one is controlled; no part of it was exacted by someone she recognizes, and that one scares her, so she doesn't  _ever_ think about it, not even when—

Not even when he flattens a palm against the screaming Cylinder and chokes out a whispered string of code through his wracking tears and she turns her head away, waiting for it to end (or maybe to restart), unable to watch. 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She thinks maybe she was a warrior, once, thick braid and an ax made by her own hands and no fear, none at all, only the roaring compulsion to speak in battle screams and victory cries, but that had never been her favorite scenario to dream, because he’s all corrupted at the edges in that one, a void instead of a chest, sunken eyes and matted hair and something of a past with her, before a quest for immortal knowledge had taken out all that she knew and replaced it with numbers she couldn’t understand.

“Get back,” she snarls, foreign blood in her mouth and on her clothes, diluted by the tears she hates have gotten out. Her hands have blisters from swinging the ax so much. Her forearms are trembling with the pain of overexertion. She does not falter. She is the last guard standing. “I won’t let you open it.”

“They told us, once,” he whispers, advancing slowly on her, face splattered in red, fingers drumming spasmodically against his thigh, “That battle is all about concentration. Always just try to find something to focus on, they said. The rest will fall into place, in time. I don’t believe that’s true.”

“Get _back_!” she repeats, in a shriek this time, unmoving though her eyes widen with impending fear. “I don’t want to have to kill you.”

And he had found shapes in clouds, once, and they had been younger. She lifts the ax when he comes closer, closer, always closer, fingertips tracing a lazy line up the underside of her elbow, fleetingly licking his dry lips, and she drops it, frozen, and he presses his forehead to hers and her eyes drop closed and her breath shudders, and something remains, between their bodies, something greater than any war, but then he tries to force his way past her and she remembers that this is all a trick and that is what she keeps telling herself, pinning him to the earth, tears and snot running from her, when she chokes him until he stops breathing.

  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


 

 

 

It isn’t as sad this time. This time, she wakes up slowly, heavy with comfort in the afternoon sunlight through the window of the hospital room, stitches in her stomach, the press of an IV in her arm, throat and eyes fuzzy.

A hand grasps hers, unapologetic.

“Casey?” She’s never heard her name spoken so eagerly, with such an ascending hopefulness, and it feels like the only one she’s ever needed, no matter the nudge of old pain that starts in the middle of her forehead. Maybe they’d knocked parts of themselves into each other when they’d bumped heads, she muses sometimes; maybe it had knotted something.

She barely opens her eyes, everything shifting and blurring above her. She thinks she catches a glimpse of fiery hair against the farthest wall, resting on the arm of one of the chairs; sitting up next to it is someone skinny and sandy-haired. She moves her gaze with effort to her left, and there he is, stitches in his eyebrow and a scabbed split on his lip and the yellowing remnants of a black eye and a map of tiny cuts all over his battered face.

He closes his other hand around hers and his, and she smiles sleepily because she’s not alert enough to stop herself, and she thinks she might remember Danielle Clarkson, and she thinks she might remember Lara Hodge, and she thinks she might remember how well they had all tricked her, promising that she could bring her poor dead parents back when they had never been gone to begin with. It all comes down to how you play the game, she had told herself, and games are better in teams.

It’s corny, she knows. Whatever. They won. She’s allowed.

“Hey,” Hunter murmurs in greeting, and she swears to God she hears tears thickening his voice, and she chuffs out a bare wisp of a laugh. “Hey, Casey. Welcome back. Nice job saving the world. You did great. I—” The words stumble, clumsy and new, just born. “I love you.”  

“I know,” she manages to croak, dry both in physicality and intent, and this is her favorite of all the chances she’s gotten.

And, screw it, maybe this is a dream, too. But it lasts for an awfully long time, and every time she holds her breath and checks, she has ten, ten, ten fingers.  

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title, because I am landfill, is from "Hello My Old Heart" by The Oh Hellos. Will I ever get sick of what that song makes me feel? CNN investigates. 
> 
> Also, this is my 100th fic on AO3. I wanted to save it for something special, but then I figured, what's more special than Maria's birthday? I told myself I was going to stay away from MG and this stupid ship that I'm probably making all of my non-Casey/Hunter friends despise by virtue of it being all I write about, but no, that didn't happen, as you can see. Both times I've caved in, it's been because of Maria; she's just that inspiring.
> 
> Attempt three, now commencing. (Fuck, I love them.)


End file.
